Reaching The Champagne Fairs
To cross the Alps, the caravans of pack mules made their way over the Mont Cenis Pass, a journey that took more than a month from Genoa to the fair cities, along one of the varied options of the Via Francigena. Professional freight-handlers might make the trek, under contract to merchants. P. Huvelin documented the existence, by the second half of the thirteenth century, of a faster courier service facilitated the transfer of letters and market information between north and south, one organised for the particular advantage of the Arte di Calimala, the cloth-merchants' guild of Florence, others organised by cities of Siena and Genoa and by the mercantile houses. In early February, 1290, it took a courier no more than twenty days to make the journey from Lagny to Florence, R. D. Face noted. Alternatively, north Italian goods were shipped to Aigues-Mortes then up or along the Rhone, Saône and Seine.
Read more about this topic: Champagne Fairs
Famous quotes containing the words reaching the, reaching and/or champagne:
“The pious ones of Plymouth who, reaching the Rock, first fell upon their own knees and then upon the aborigines.”
—William M. Evarts (1818–1901)
“There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.”
—Elias Canetti (b. 1905)
“I’m only a beer teetotaller, not a champagne teetotaller. I don’t like beer.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)